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Comment by Viliam1234 | Hacker News Reader

Some of them do, some of them don't.

WTF is "trans-identifying"? They are not literally identifying as "trans". They are identifying as men/women (although the opposite of their biology), not as "trans". "Trans" is a description for people who identify as other than their biological sex; it is not an identity, per se.

You can doubt whether a trans woman is "really" a woman. But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

It makes as much sense as replacing "tall people" with "tall-identifying people".

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They do. "I thought you knew I'm trans".

> Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans"

They are not trying to be of another biological sex. "opposite" is a rather bad term here. They are living out their idea of what a person from the other sex would do. "their idea" emphasized.

> It makes as much sense as replacing "tall people" with "tall-identifying people".

"tall" is an measurable thing. Distance is a metric unit, even.

> But you cannot doubt that a trans woman is "really" trans. Trying to be the opposite of your biological sex is what "trans" literally means.

Breaking it down, trans has two parts to it. The smaller part is simply describing those who are going through transition. There's no identity requirement here, though most people would consider themselves trans if they're going through transition.

But on the other hand, you can also be trans if you...simply identify as such, even if you make no effort to socially or medically transition, with or without a formal diagnosis.

The flip side is, you also can suffer from dysphoria and wish you were born as the opposite sex and still be cisgender, as long as you don't actively want to identify as transgender for whatever reason.

So I'd say a large part of it is identity based. If (say in a survey) we let people classify themselves into short/medium/tall and it was self-reported like gender was, we'd probably use "survey respondents who identify as being tall" or "tall-identifying people" too.

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